At 12:15 AM 4/14/00 -0700, Steve Sabram wrote:
>KimDongGyun wrote:
>
> > I want to develop programs having something like push technology.
> > Server pushes binary data to PalmVII for a specified time and then, PDA
> > displays the data.
>
>This goes dead against the entire philosophy of the Palm VII. With the
>exception of very vertical niches, "push" technology has
>been a miserable failure. Palm products have been successful by keeping
>the user in control of what is on their data instead of a
>centralized publisher.
There's a difference between "push" in the PointCast sense and "push" in
the pager sense. Ringing your cell phone (or land line phone) is a form of
push, no?
But as Steve said, control is important so we don't want to lose that, but
that doesn't mean all push is out.
I think on wireless small mobile devices what you want is access to data
that changes when you're away from your desk. Wireless access to your
address book isn't important; access to email and stock quotes are because
they do change. Being able to have the server figure out what to send to
your mobile device is very useful to reduce bandwidth consumption. You can
fake push by polling, but that's expensive.
So I think it's desirable to have some form of push (perhaps a bad term) in
a wireless device, but not in the PointCast sense.
With the pdQ phone you can send a page and use the API's to capture the
data in your app, though some carrier's pager networks aren't quite up to
real time delivery of pages yet. If you really want you can even fake the
whole thing by placing a phone call. The API's on the phone allow you to
check caller ID and answer the phone. Obviously you can't carry any data
with that, but you can use it to trigger a data call. Don't tell the
carriers I suggested this :-)
LL
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